High Arctic Exhibition Mimics Glaciers in Museum

The High Arctic exhibition is inspired by climate change -- and Lego bricks.Photo courtesy National Maritime Museum.

United Visual Artists — famous for providing stage visuals to Massive Attack and Chemical Brothers — has teamed up with London’s National Maritime Museum to create an enormous exhibition that will give visitors a taste of what it’s like to travel to the Arctic.

[partner id=”wireduk”]The piece — called High Arctic — was inspired by a visit to the Arctic by United Visual Artists co-founder Matt Clark with the arts-and-climate-science foundation Cape Farewell. Cape Farewell‘s aim is to inspire a cultural response to the climate challenge and engage artists as catalysts to provoke cultural shift toward a more sustainable society.

Clark spent three weeks sailing aboard the Noorderlicht, a 100-year-old Dutch schooner, alongside scientists, poets, musicians and polar bears. Climate scientists measured the likes of sea temperature, salinity and acidity of the water, while artists were there to be inspired by magnificent landscape.

‘Walking across these glaciers was the most magical moment for me.’

Clark told Wired.co.uk: “Walking across these glaciers was the most magical moment for me. When I was standing on one of them, one of the scientists said: ‘In 50 years’ time, these won’t be here.’ It is this beauty, scale and fragility — and a sense of loss — which we are trying to embody in this exhibition.”

The exhibition takes place in a brand new 130-foot-by-56-foot room in the National Maritime Museum. The room is shaped by 3,000 white pillars at varying heights (from a few inches to 13 feet), designed to echo the shapes of the glaciers of the Arctic. The majority of these “glaciers” will have individual names based on the names of the more than 2,500 glaciers on the Arctic archipelago Svalbard.

The highly stylized model of the Arctic combines the skills of architectural lighting designer, art code, animation, sound design and poetry. The jutting columns of “ice” — which will actually be made out of MDF or a specially coated polystyrene — had their scale based on Lego models because, as team member Ben Kreukniet explains, “Lego is awesome.” He added: “So we made these columns exactly 10 times the size of a pillar of [square, single-layer] Lego blocks.”

These are built up into around 65 little islands to form an overall archipelago. Kreukniet adds: “We wanted it to be an abstraction of the environment rather than literal.”

The journey is narrated by an epic, fragmented poem — by fellow Nick Drake, who traveled to Svalbard with Clark — that is laced into the islands through a network of 100 speakers. Clark explains: “He’s using actual quotes from early explorers, early whalers, racing to get to the North Pole.”

The landscape is supposedly set 100 years in the future, looking back at the glaciers that have been lost. The poem provides a continuous narrative starting 1,500 years ago through early discovery and toward the melting of the ice caps at the end.

The crucial element of the exhibition is the fact that visitors use ultraviolet flashlights to navigate their way through the darkened space. These flashlights activate projections in what would be the torch’s beam. As they weave their way through the ice islands, there are five open “pool” areas for visitors to explore with their flashlights.

Thanks to a network of 10 ceiling-mounted cameras that track the UV lights and 10 projectors, the torches activate different projected animations in each of the “pools.” These are styled in the same way that the glaciers are, and progressively become more polluted as visitors journey through the five different Arctic stages. The more flashlights there are in a certain area, the wider the beam of the projection appears in that particular pool. Some 70 people can explore the exhibition space simultaneously.

‘It is more of a sensory, emotional space … a playful, musical, visual experience rather than just being a lecture.’

The projections are supported by a generative sonic landscape designed by Max Eastley and Henrik Ekeus that allows for the movement of gestures throughout the room. For example, the sound of a gust of wind can blow down through the room “to give a cohesiveness over and above the individual interactions with the space,” according to Clark.

The entire production, including the stage lighting, the projections, the camera tracking and the soundscape, is controlled by UVA’s proprietary D3 software, described as “an integrated production tool for sculptural media installations.”

Software director and co-founder Ash Nehru said that this marks a “departure from traditional exhibition.” He explains: “It is more of a sensory, emotional space — something that is more of a playful, musical, visual experience rather than just being a lecture. We want to make you feel something and stimulate your desire to learn stuff. If you are a kid, we want to make you want to find out more and be an explorer.”